Criterion Games

What Criterion Games is

Criterion Games is a British developer based in Guildford, England, and owned by Electronic Arts. Its studio page carries an address on Onslow Street in the town, and EA lists it among its internal studios. Criterion is best known for the Burnout series of arcade racing games and, later, for several entries in EA's Need for Speed franchise.

The studio's reputation rests on a particular idea of driving: fast, aggressive, and built around risk. That approach first appeared in Burnout at the start of the 2000s and was sharpened across sequels, and it shaped how later Criterion games handled speed and collisions. For a studio of its size, Criterion has had an unusually visible influence on the racing genre.

Origins in a middleware company

Criterion did not begin as a game studio. It grew out of Criterion Software, a company founded in 1993 to sell a 3D graphics and rendering library called RenderWare. RenderWare was widely used across the industry, and Criterion's own games were made partly to demonstrate what the technology could do. The software became one of the most widely licensed engines of its era, which gave the small team both influence and a reason to start making its own titles.

A dedicated game development division, Criterion Studios, was set up in January 1996 and based in Guildford. The first Burnout, released in 2000, was among the early games built on the third version of RenderWare. The studio kept the Burnout brand and technology while selling publishing rights to a partner, a split that shaped its early independence.

The Burnout years

The first two Burnout games were published by Acclaim, and Burnout 2: Point of Impact, released in 2002, sold around two million copies. Despite that, the publisher struggled to market the series in the United States, its home market. Electronic Arts had been courting the studio, and the two agreed to work together on a third game.

Burnout 3: Takedown, developed by Criterion Games and published by Electronic Arts, shipped for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in September 2004. EA's own announcement described it as the latest title in the critically acclaimed Burnout series and noted it had been named Best Racing Game of E3 2004. It was the first Burnout released under EA and the point at which the series reached a much larger audience.

The Electronic Arts buyout

In 2004 EA moved from publisher to owner. The company announced in July that year that it had agreed with Canon's European arm to acquire the whole Criterion Software group, and the deal closed in October 2004. Reports at the time put the price at 68 million US dollars. For Criterion the sale ended its run as a company with independent publishing deals and folded it into one of the largest publishers in the world.

The purchase brought both the studio and the Burnout intellectual property inside EA, and EA has owned Criterion ever since. RenderWare, the middleware that had funded the studio's start, was gradually withdrawn from the commercial market after the deal, though elements of it continued to be used internally. What the studio kept was its name, its Guildford base, and the racing craft that had built its reputation.

From Burnout to Need for Speed

After Burnout, Criterion turned to EA's larger racing franchise. It developed Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit in 2010 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted in 2012, both built on its own approach to arcade driving, and it took over the Need for Speed series for a period. The studio also contributed to other EA properties over the years.

The studio's later racing work concluded with Need for Speed Unbound in 2022, which applied its stylised approach to street racing. Along the way Criterion's headcount and remit changed more than once, with teams moving between projects and other EA studios, a pattern common across large publishers whose internal developers are frequently reassigned. Through all of it the studio stayed in Guildford, the town where it has been based since it began.

What Criterion is now

In 2026, around the studio's thirtieth anniversary, Criterion rebranded itself as a Battlefield studio. Reporting on the change quoted a senior figure at Battlefield Studios Europe, Rebecka Coutaz, saying the team were solely focused on Battlefield and had no plans to return to racing. The studio's new identity reads Criterion: A Battlefield Studio.

That shift ends, for now, the racing line that began with Burnout. Criterion had supported Battlefield games for years before the rebrand, so the change confirmed a direction rather than starting one. For players who grew up with Burnout and Need for Speed, the practical effect is that no new Criterion racing game is in development. Whether the studio ever returns to racing is unclear, but the 2026 statements left little room for it in the near term.

Games

• AirBlade
• Battlefield 2042
• Burnout
• Burnout 3: Takedown
• Burnout Crash!
• Burnout Legends
• Burnout Paradise
• Burnout Paradise Remastered
• Deep Fighter
• Need for Speed Most Wanted Complete DLC Bundle
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted - Terminal Velocity
• Need for Speed: Most Wanted - Ultimate Speed Pack
• NFS Most Wanted Complete
• Redline Racer
• RemiLore: Lost Girl in the Lands of Lore
• Scorched Planet
• Speedboat Attack
• Star Wars Battlefront II
• Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
• Sub Culture
• Suzuki Alstare Extreme Racing
• TrickStyle

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